Swift Package Catalog and Swift Sandbox Deprecation

Swift on the Server continues to evolve.

Since the launch of Swift@IBM in 2015, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the Swift language. As part of our¬†collaboration with the server-side Swift community, we created tools like Swift Sandbox,¬†enabling hundreds of thousands of developers to experiment with Swift on Linux. We also built the Swift Package Catalog, a centralized location to discover packages while exploring the Swift ecosystem.

Today, Swift on the server is thriving. Community driven Swift¬†events around the world are growing with record¬†attendance while newsletters and online courses devoted to Swift on the server abound. The strength of our community¬†is seen in the standardization being done in the Server workgroup,¬†and the advancements in frameworks such as Kitura, Perfect, Vapor, and newcomer Tris. Thanks in large part to Foundation completeness and commercial support, including¬†IBM Swift on Linux,¬†Swift on Linux is ready! Production systems leveraging cloud technology¬†are available, including¬†Swift on Docker, IBM Cloud, and Vapor Cloud.

Swift Sandbox & Swift Package Catalog

Today, we announce the deprecation of Swift Sandbox and Swift Package Catalog, to take place in January of 2018. While both bolstered server-side Swift adoption and experimentation, previewing Swift on the server in this fashion is no longer required. Given the pervasiveness of cloud computing, it is now easier than ever to experiment directly in these environments.¬†IBM’s¬†App Service console will create and deploy a server-side Swift application in less than five minutes.¬†Kitura Init and IBM Cloud Developer Tools quickly create and run a Kitura application in a local sandbox.¬†As well, any¬†Kitura, Vapor, or Perfect app that runs Docker can be easily deployed to IBM Cloud. The package ecosystem has also matured, thanks in part to the Swift 4 enhancements of Swift Package Manager, and the growing number of Swift packages on Github which can be explored using other Swift package discovery tools like Swift Modules.

Does “deprecate” mean end? If so, that’s really disappointing. As someone brand new to Swift — and to lingo like “deprecating” — I love using Swift Sandbox to learn on. The other options given for n00bs like me aren’t nearly as nice or accessible.

We are committed to growing the Swift on the server community, and encourage you to reach out with any questions via Slack. This community is a great place for beginners and experts alike. We believe in this programming language, and want to help you succeed as you learn more about its powerful capabilities.

We have no intention of deprecating Kitura at this time. We recently just release Kitura 2.0 with tooling that lets you run a Swift sandbox locally in a docker Container. We think you’ll find that’s much more compelling than a web sandbox.

Hi Zubair, thanks for you continued interest! You should retrieve your code now while the Sandbox is still online. Your code should run without change in the local sandbox offered by our IBM Developer Tools CLI.

“While both bolstered server-side Swift adoption and experimentation, previewing Swift on the server in this fashion is no longer required.”

It’s always disappointing when some piece of technology makes a task easy, and then goes away and it’s hard again. The online Swift Sandbox was never /required/, but it made experimentation 100 times easier.

“IBM‚Äôs App Service console will create and deploy a server-side Swift application in less than five minutes.”

That’s an unusual claim to make here. Anyone could paste a line of Swift code into the IBM Swift Sandbox, and see a result in about 3 seconds. This is essentially saying “We’ve made it 100 times harder.” That does not feel like progress to me.

The IBM Swift Sandbox was one of the things that made it practical for lots of us to experiment with Swift. I also used it to test bugs on different versions of the Swift compiler. Now I suppose I’m supposed to learn Docker and the IBM App Service console, but realistically I don’t have time for that (I tried!), so I’m probably going to just give up on Swift for Linux. It’s still going strong on (Apple) clients, but there’s other server-side languages that are much easier to set up, and more mature.

This looks like another case of a company not realizing the tremendous value in a technology they created. I hope Apple or repl.it or someone can pick up the mantle. Unfortunately, none of them seems to care much about Swift on Linux, so I’m not optimistic.

I tried to login to the site and I am getting errors. My concern is that I have a lot of code saved on the site (well documented too) during the times I was learning swift. And in there are a lot of templates that I was going to use in future development. How do I get this code?

This is definitely more of a money move than anything. Being able to run that in the browser from anywhere was a great solution, and taking it away to promote Kitura discourages the use of wanting to create a local sandbox in that way. Why do that when I can just use my own local cli to build the code I wrote? It’s obvious that by your user base, you’re doing this to just catch up to Vapor’s install rate.